It is practices that make objects meaningful, such that we know a chair is a chair and not an artefact. When these practices come together they create ‘disclosure spaces’ or ‘worlds’, these worlds and the actions within them “are organised by a style” (p456).
‘Historical disclosing’ is when practices/actions are done that don’t reinforce the style of the world but that change it, open up new possibilities and change perceptions of that world. (P456)
From the book: “ [F]or a change in cultural practices to be meaningful there must be continuity within the change” (p168), in other words change is historical and relies on continuity with the past.
Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus say there are 3 ways of making change: the ‘innovative entrepreneur’ brings “marginal practices or concerns to the centre” through ‘reconfiguration’; the ‘virtuous citizen’ shifts a “practice or concern from one world or sphere of life to another” through ‘cross-appropriation’ using “interpretive speaking”; the ‘culture figure’ does “the process of retrieving or reviving forgotten and/or dispersed practices and concerns” through ‘articulation’.
Entrepreneurs must embrace the anomalies in order to innovate.
Interpretive speaking rather than persuasive speaking “allows some practice, thing or identity to appear as worthy of consideration by a mixed community” (p99 from the book), this often comes from personal narratives rather than rational arguments (p460).
“Cultural figures call a community back to its fundamental “concerns”, or its underlying “goods and values” (p119)” (p460). For example Martin Luther King Jr. The idea is to remind people of something central that has been forgotten. Bercovitch among others argues that this can stifle progress, that the narrative will be stuck in the past. However Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus believe that history-making is a double gesture or both past and future. “Jeremiadic articulation is, like all history-making, a double gesture; it provides a means whereby our concerns are “both conserved and redesigned” (p140)” (p461).
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